longform_journalisms_place_on_the_webfandomcom-20200214-history
Reemergence in long form
The statistics regarding long-form journalism are dismal. The Los Angelos Times ''published 86% fewer stories of 2,000 words or more in 2013. The ''New York Times ''published 25% fewer and ''the Wall Street Journal ''published 35% fewer. BuzzFeed is considered the grim reaper of long-form journalism. Their quick, snappy pieces have been emulated by news sites across the country. Pieces titled "15 Reasons White Wine is better than Red Wine," "21 times tumblr told the truth about cats" and "Costco Facts you need to know" have become synonymous with the publication. That is probably why the site has been charged with the murder of traditional journalism. However, those actually following BuzzFeed in the past few years would be confused by these claims. Sure, the site is mostly made up of quick-hitting click bait, but those pieces are easier, cheaper and quicker to create. Just because BuzzFeed churns out so many articles like this, does not mean that is the emphasis in the newsroom. BuzzFeed garnered attention over the summer in the long form arena with a piece called, "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." At 6,000 words, it is hardly the type of story that BuzzFeed readers are used to seeing on the site. Still, the article racked up over a million page views, hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes and thousands of twitter shares. "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500," is not unusual or rare for BuzzFeed. Recently, the site increased focus on long-form feature writing. McKay Coppins’ nearly 2,000-word essay on the “race wars” of the right-wing media, which got around 120,000 page views in the first five days after it was published.' 'In 2012, BuzzFeed hired the late Michael Hastings to cover the election. Many of his articles that year were thousands of words long, and BuzzFeed sold the entire collection as an eBook called "Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Story of Obama's Last Campaign." When he died in 2013, BuzzFeed created a long-form fellowship on the topic of national security, which Hastings was working on prior to his death leading to many of the conspiracies surrounding it. Hastings wasn't the only big-name hire for BuzzFeed. The same year it hired Hastings, it also hired Steve Kandell, former editor-in-chief for ''Spin, ''to be its new features editor. In 2013, they hired Mark Schoofs, Pulitzer Prize winner in 2000, to head up their "investigative unit." This year, they hired Chris Hamby, another Pulitzer Prize winner, to join Schoofs' investigative effort. Hamby won a Pulitzer for “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine,” an investigation into coal miner's development of black lung. “Even though print itself is becoming less prevalent, the conversation-provoking longform journalism and profiles that have long been a staple of magazines are as vital as they’ve ever been, and I’m thrilled to help make this kind of writing a working part of the social web at BuzzFeed,” Kandell said, in a BuzzFeed article announcing his hire. When Ben Smith, aka @buzzfeedben, was approached by BuzzFeed, he was still immersed in his current publication, Politico. “I had no plans to leave Politico at all,” Smith [http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/buzzfeed-adds-politico-writer/?_r=0 told ''the New York Times]. “I was totally bit by the bug of how exciting this was.” Smith is an internet-immersed reporter, claiming to get most of his news from twitter. His immersion in social media made him the perfect man for the job. It seems unlikely that a man receiving most of his news from twitter would know how to create an ideal venue for long-form journalism, but that is exactly what made him perfect. That's because he realized the power of social recommendation. “There’s been a massive shift from an Internet organized around portals to search engines to social, and social favors great content,” BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith said, in an interview with AdWeek. “People like sharing things that reflect well on them, and there’s a prestige attached to the longform hashtag. It’s a little bit like boasting to your friends, ‘Hey look, I read this!’” This social sharing phenomenon not only gives stories more readers, it also gives them more shelf life. Among the most popular articles on Longform.org, a long-from curation site, 30% are over a year and a half old. The New York Times "''Snow Fall," which has become a go-to example of new new journalism and the multimedia model in long form, had nearly 3 million page views. In 2012, it had already been shared over 10,000 times just on twitter. Longreads.com, which stemmed from a twitter hash tag, is another site that has seen the increase in attention toward online, long-form journalism and has taken advantage of this market. It is a aggregation site that presents long-form pieces from across the web. Sites like longreads.com have had a huge impact in long-form journalism's reemergence. Mark Armstrong, founder of longreads.com, says his goal is "to expand distribution and get stories to as many people as possible," which he has done as his site averages 100,000 unique visitors each month. Armstrong noted four keys to long-form journalism's resurgence in a recent interview with ''Forbes. (see image on right) Long form journalism definitely has an audience online. Some of the most read and most influential pieces of the past few years have been in a long-form format. BuzzFeed's piece by McKay Coppins’, "a 2,000-word essay on the “race wars” of the right-wing media," received "120,000 pageviews in the first five days after it was published." Espn.com's most read piece in 2013 was “Michael Jordan has Not Left the Building,” which came in at around 7,500 words, by Wright Thompson, a writer who has become famous for his long pieces. Other than the Michael Jordan piece, he is also very well known and has won awards for many of his stories, notably ones on Dan Gable and Johnny Manziel. ''Forbes ''series on Best Buy garnered three million page views and thousands of comments. Despite all of the negative talk surrounding it, long form journalism has made a splash online and has certainly found an audience.